Lost and found history

Recently I was googling for online references to projects I had been involved with a couple of decades ago. I had this eery feeling about the past, my past, because it wasn't there. Around 1993 or 94, material started appearing on the world wide web, but prior to that date, the continental shelf of online history abruptly stops.

Of course this is not completely true. There have been a number of noble efforts -- often times volunteer -- to put primary source material like geneologies, church records, census scans, etc. online. But today, documents as a matter of course are put online; pre-web they maybe ended up in a depository library or a special collection somewhere, and generally buried in dunes of printed ephemera.

Better to light a candle...

I started to transcribe some of the things I worked on back then, because I think they are of some historic significance. The first bit is the Preface and Introduction to a pamphlet call "Stop the MSU-Iran Film Project", from October, 1977.

The document is an interesting example of mid-1970s campus activism -- that post-Vietnam period where focus shifted to other instances of U.S. foreign policy like Chile and Iran. It is also interesting as an expose of university involvement in that policy. Michigan State University had a particularly nasty record, which the introduction touches on.

The document is also interesting in how similar things are, and also how different things are -- Brazil now has a populist president and is part of the Latin America pink tide; South Korea is an Asian Tiger; the Shah was deposed shortly after the film project and the ayatollahs of the bazaar took over. Who knows what happened to the marxist comrades in the 1970s Iranian student movement.

Looking back now, I would say the mid-1970s was a period of transition from imperialism to globalization, one process was being overlaid and replaced by another. Brazil and South Korea became active participants in the new global economic order -- not just economic reserves or dumping grounds or plantations; Iran represented the first expression of religious fundamentalism as a response to globalization.


jd